Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci(Xinhua/AFP File Photo)

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ROME, Sept. 15 (Xinhua) -- Famous Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci died Thursday night in her native Florence after a long battle with lung cancer, local media reported Friday. She was 77.

Fallaci, a radical campaigner, war correspondent and scourge of the powerful who returned to her Catholic roots in her final years, sparked a storm with anti-Islam books after the September 11, 2001,attacks on the U.S.

Among the tributes to her on Friday, Italian President Giorgio Napolitano called her "a world-famous journalist" and "an impassioned protagonist of animated cultural battles".

The head of the Italian Journalists' Union called her a "great, courageous and scrupulous journalist but also an intellectual whose most recent views were unacceptable and in many respects dangerous", the reports said.

The Rage and the Pride (2002) shocked many of her old admirers but won her new ones as she slammed Islam as "oppressive" and Arab immigrants in Europe as "bigoted".

Defying political correctness, she followed up in similar vein two years later in The Force of Reason, saying that Europe risked becoming "Eurabia" and had "sold itself like a whore to sultans."

The first book attacked Pope John Paul II for apologizing for the Crusades. She changed tack in the second one and praised the Church for defending Europe's Christian roots against a "relativist " and multicultural drift.

A year ago, the chain smoking feminist once at the forefront of Italy's abortion and divorce campaigns was received by Pope Benedict XVI. By then, she described herself as "a Christian atheist".

Fallaci first showed her combative spirit in joining the anti-fascist Resistance at the age of 17.

She was later a correspondent in Vietnam, the Indo-Pakistani and Middle East conflicts, and South American uprisings.

She was wounded in 1968 at a protest against the Olympic Games in Mexico City.

Working for Italy's leading newspaper Corriere della Sera and the newsweekly l'Europeo, Fallaci won renown with a series of prickly interviews with some of the world's most powerful figures including Henry Kissinger, Golda Meir, Yasser Arafat, General Giap, Colonel Ghaddafi, Indira Ghandi, Deng Xiaoping and Ayatollah Khomeini.

She also worked for leading publications across Europe and the United States including the The Washington Post, the New York Times, Life, the New Republic, Le Nouvelle Observateur and Stern. Enditem

Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci(Xinhua/AFP File Photo)

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